The Gospel and the Sacred. By Robert G. Hamerton-
Kelly. Fortress. 175 pp. $14 paper.

The Bible, Violence, and the Sacred. By James G.
Williams. Trinity. 288 pp. $16 paper.

In 1947, in response to Arthur Koestler's anti-Stalinist novel Darkness
at Noon, a French philosopher produced one of the most horrifying books
ever written. Though many of his contemporaries thought Maurice Merleau-
Ponty (and not Jean-Paul Sartre or Albert Camus) to have the finest
philosophical gifts of his generation, what makes Merleau-Ponty's
Humanism and Terror so horrifying is not simply that it exhibits a
first-class mind pimping for Stalin and the Moscow Show Trials of the
1930s. What makes it so horrifying is that Merleau-Ponty is right-
obscenely right, immorally right: violence can found culture, terror can
preserve stability, the unanimity created by the sacrifice of a
scapegoat can become so complete that it includes even its victim.

In 1972, a French literary critic returned to the question of the
violent root of culture. But where Merleau-Ponty, uneasy with his own
analysis, turned away from further investigation, Rene Girard has
relentlessly pursued the effect of violence through literature,
anthropology, psychology, and biblical criticism. In a stream of books-
Violence and the Sacred (1972), Things Hidden Since the Foundation of
the World (1978), The Scapegoat (1982), Job (1985), and A Theater of
Envy: William Shakespeare (1990)-and a torrent of articles and
interviews, Girard has relentlessly pursued what even he laughingly
calls his idee fixe: the way in which scapegoats found, preserve, and
unify culture.

The pursuit has cost Girard something of the influence in American and
European academic circles that he gained in the 1960s and 1970s. In
1961, he published Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, a study of desire and
the way in which "triangular" relations form between characters in the
works of certain novelists (especially Cervantes, Proust, and
Dostoyevsky). In France the influential Marxist critic Lucien Goldmann
gave the book the sort of major review that founds a young critic's
career-praising it primarily, I think, because Girard seemed to provide
(in the "humanistic Marxism" line once held by Georg Lukacs) a way to
use great literature to criticize bourgeois life without relying upon
the Freudianism that dominated literary criticism at the time.

That promoting Marxism was not Girard's actual intent has since become
clear. Though the ultra-conservative critic Thomas Molnar once accused
Girard of positivism and antireligious materialism, the postmodernist
radical Hayden White has more believably accused him of medievalism and
reactionary defense of religion. But through the 1960s, with the (still
untranslated) studies of Dostoyevsky that followed Deceit, Desire, and
the Novel and with a series of powerful essays (partially collected in
the 1978 To Double Business Bound), Girard became a major figure in
literary criticism and an important player on the American university
scene. (Reared in France, he has spent his career teaching in America,
recently retiring from Stanford.) The publication of Violence and the
Sacred, his sortie onto the anthropology battlefield over which the
structuralists and post-structuralists were fighting to the death, was
greeted-by literary critics, at least-with ecstatic reviews.

Given the generally radical and overwhelmingly antireligious bias of
modern literary criticism, this importance granted a Roman Catholic
thinker represents a considerable anomaly. But there was a certain
coyness about Christian faith in Girard's literary and anthropological
work through the sixties and seventies-a certain tempering of the wind
to the shorn lambs of the literary fold, perhaps, or even a certain
jesuitical misdirection. In a recent book-length interview with Michel
Treguer, Girard speaks of his return to Catholicism in 1959. Only the
most careful reader, however, could have discovered Christianity in
Girard's early writings. Michel Serres seemed eccentric and willful
when, in his review of the 1978 study of psychology, Things Hidden Since
the Foundation of the World, he failed to mention that the book concerns
the revelation of Christ. But many reviewers missed the implications of
Christian revelation in the 1972 Violence and the Sacred. The influence
of that earlier book and the place of its central chapters in
anthologies of modern literary criticism may owe a great deal to this
anti-Christian misreading.

As the possibility of misreading Girard's ventures into biblical
revelation became less plausible, however, Girard's acknowledged
influence on literary criticism began to wane. Despite the contemporary
interest in victimization, citations by literary critics to his writings
have became rarer and direct studies of his work (such as the feminist
attacks by Sarah Kofman and Toril Moi) have became more combative. In
recent years, Girard's stock in the academic establishments of France
and America has very much declined. But this decline has been matched
with a gain, as a number of writers, banding together as the Colloquium
on Violence and Religion, have taken up Girard's notion of the
sacrificial scapegoat and devoted themselves to its application. Like
Leo Strauss, Ernest Becker, and Eric Voegelin before him, Rene Girard
has been transformed into something of a sect in America, with
disciples, translators, and proselytizers.

To some extent, the transformation may have had a good effect, releasing
Girard from the ghetto of literary criticism and pointing him in
directions he needed to go-notably with Fr. Raymund Schwager's
application of Girard's work to orthodox Christology in Must There Be
Scapegoats? (1978) and with Andrew McKenna's analysis of philosophy's
hidden violence in Violence and Difference (1992). But this development
may have had an unhappy effect as well, over-extending his thought and
yet simultaneously narrowing it into a "Girardian System." Both these
effects-the good and the bad-are visible in four books published by
Girardians in the last year: Cesareo Bandera's literary study, The
Sacred Game; James Williams' new edition of his 1991 The Bible,
Violence, and the Sacred; Robert Hamerton-Kelly's study of violence in
Mark, The Gospel and the Sacred; and Gil Bailie's account of
contemporary culture, Violence Unveiled.

Of the four books, Bailie's Violence Unveiled is the best introduction
to the Girardian topics of violence, culture, and sacrifice. It is an
easily accessible and beautifully crafted analysis that moves freely
from Greek literature to current news stories, from Aztec myths to
Captain Cook's experience in Tahiti, and finds in them all the grounds
for a persuasive biblical and anti-violent Christian apologetics.
Specialist and nonspecialist alike will find Bailie's book rewarding; I
recommend it highly. In The Sacred Game, the Spanish scholar Cesareo
Bandera presents a much more technical study of the sacred in the
poetical epics and philosophical aesthetics of both Classical Antiquity
and the Renaissance; specialists will find Bandera's introduction and
his chapters on Virgil and Renaissance poetry especially fruitful.

With Williams' The Bible, Violence, and the Sacred and Hamerton-Kelly's
The Gospel and the Sacred, however, the problems of "Girardianism"-of
Girard's insights taken as a scientific system-begin to come clear. Both
books contain biblical readings that specialists will find interesting
and provocative, and Williams includes a marvelous conclusion that
applies his biblical exegesis to contemporary social analysis. But in
his introduction Williams briefly indulges the temptation to make
Girard's "anthropology of revelation" systematic, while Hamerton-Kelly
succumbs completely-devoting twenty-four pages (out of 175) to a
systematic appendix on "the theory of the generative mimetic
scapegoating mechanism" (or the "GMSM," as he constantly abbreviates
it).

Girard himself, however, denies that there is any "Girard System."
Following a tradition dating back to Descartes' 1648 Conversation with
Burman, French intellectuals often use interviews to put on record major
qualifications of their work, and Girard has insisted in dozens of
interviews that he has no theory. "If a Rabelais shows up," he jokes
with Rebecca Adams, "he will do hilarious things . . . with our use of
the word 'theory.' . . . The next generation will wonder what could move
so many people to go on endlessly writing the most convoluted prose in a
complete void of their own making, disconnected not only from the
reality of their world but from the great literary texts, of which
recent theory has been making a shamelessly parasitic use."

The desire to follow a French tradition, however, may not be the only
reason that so much of Girard's thought appears in interviews. Things
Hidden Since the Foundation of the World is an aggravating book to read,
primarily because it consists entirely of interviews with a pair of
psychiatrists, Jean-Michel Oughourlian and Guy Lefort. "We quite
deliberately left out all concessions to the reader," the introduction
superfluously notes. But Girard's resignation to using the form of an
interview-his inability throughout the 1970s to produce a
straightforward book on the anthropology of Christian revelation-
originates, I believe, in his desire to avoid the tar pit of quasi-
science in which Freud found himself so deeply mired.

Rather, beginning with what he calls a "dense intuition," a "block"
penetrated little by little, Girard has moved in his investigations
since 1959 from an observation of desire in the novel to an observation
of revelation in the Gospel. The great texts are deeper, stronger, and
larger than our readings; they interpret our theories rather than allow
our theories to interpret them. Things Hidden is a convoluted, difficult
work that begins as anthropology's critique of biblical revelation and
turns into revelation's critique of anthropology. At his best, Girard
has simply let the progress of his reading-first in literature, then in
anthropology, then in psychology, then in biblical theology-strip away
the outer layers of his "dense intuition" to reveal the Cross.

This progress has sometimes exposed him as an opsimath, discovering
important theological texts only late in his career. Though Fergus Kerr
(in his defense of Girard against John Milbank's objections in the 1990
Theology and Social Theory) reports that Girard was not aware of
parallels between his own analysis and St. Augustine's until others
pointed it out to him, Girard observes in the interview with Treguer
that three-quarters of what he has to say is already in St. Augustine.
Though in 1978 he dismissed with surprising offhandedness the
sacrificial theology of the New Testament's Letter to the Hebrews, in
the 1993 interview with Rebecca Adams he mocks his own earlier dismissal
and reasserts the importance of that text. The more orthodoxy Girard
discovers, the more orthodox he becomes. This progress of discovery may
be what preserved him from anthropology's quasi-scientific reduction of
all religions to a single phenomenon of the sacred: Girard sharply
criticizes "the inability of the greatest minds in the modern world to
grasp the difference between the Christian crib at Christmastime and the
bestial monstrosities of mythological births."

The insight on the edge of which Merleau-Ponty trembled in 1947 is an
insight into the failure of mythology after Christ: the election of a
scapegoat may in fact have worked to found culture in the days before
biblical revelation, but the Gospels reveal how it works, and an
understanding of how it works destroys the possibility of it working. If
we know the victim to be innocent, we can still pronounce him guilty,
but we will not succeed in being drawn together-we will not succeed in
founding a culture-with the pronouncement.

Human desire is not essentialized, Girard argues against Freud; it does
not come naturally packaged in such mandatory Freudian shapes as the
death instinct, the Oedipal longing of the boy to possess his mother, or
the woman's envy of the male phallus. Desire is instead mimetic (as the
great novelists have all seen), and we learn what to desire by watching
the desiring of others. The key to understanding how the sacrifice of a
scapegoat once worked to found and preserve culture lies in Girard's
notion of desire. Underneath cultural scapegoat myths there lurks the
desperate hope of controlling the outbreak of swirling, undifferentiated
desire-mimetic desire gone mad in a cultural crisis in which imitation
imitates imitation and violence breeds upon itself.

Some Girardians seem to envision a pre-cultural state of primal violence
and thus to open Girard's thought to Milbank's complaint that what
little we know of ancient history offers no evidence that cities and
towns were actually born in riot and mayhem. To interpret scapegoat
myths, however, we need not posit a primal violence. We need only notice
that every culture manifests in its myths a deep terror of the breakdown
of all distinctions and the mimetic escalation of violence. Against this
threatened violence of all against all, cultural myth poses the solution
of another violence: the violence of all against one, the violence in
which the scapegoat-the sin-eater, the disease-carrier, the heretic, the
witch, the Jew-is arbitrarily selected as the source of the cultural
breakdown and murdered, sacrificed, or expelled.

It is tempting to pause and note that by the elimination of the
scapegoat, the cycle of mimetic violence ceases and the culture is able
to establish its violence-preventing distinctions and forms. Indeed,
Girard devoted most of Violence and the Sacred to analyzing the ways in
which much religious ritual reenacts symbolically both the original mad
mimetic violence of a culture and the cultural foundation achieved by
the sacrifice of a scapegoat. Ritual thus serves the important cultural
purpose of reinforcing and transmitting the lessons learned in a
scapegoat-broken cycle of violence. The scapegoat, perceived as
simultaneously the cause and the solution to violence, becomes the
sacred: the single locus of both divine terror and divine blessing, the
unity of the two manifestations of the holy famously described by
Rudolph Otto.

The more interesting point, however, and the one that has occupied
Girard for the last twenty years, is the impossibility of our ever
knowing that this is in fact how myth works. The story of the scapegoat
ought to be impenetrable. Myth serves primarily to hide the
arbitrariness of the victim and the fact that the innocent victim is a
victim at all. If we know the victim to be arbitrary, we cannot succeed
in making him sacred; if we know the victim to be innocent, the cycle of
violence and the breakdown of culture cannot be solved-as they were not
solved in Athens, for instance, by the innocent Socrates' death.

We have in cultural anthropology, however, one set of religious texts
that seems to take the side of the victim. Often in the Old Testament
and overwhelmingly in the New, the mythology of scapegoat sacrifice is
penetrated and thereby rendered ineffectual. Christianity is a religion,
as Paul Dumouchel puts it, that "should not exist." Girard is entirely
serious in his "anthropology of revelation," but he means the opposite
of the reduction of Judeo-Christian revelation to a general
anthropological category of "sacred religion." Judaism and Christianity
are fundamentally anti-sacred in their partisanship for the victim, and
this is only possible (logically, scientifically, anthropologically) if
Judaism and Christianity actually do have a divine revelation-if the
Bible, to put it bluntly, is true.

There are obviously dangers in this sort of thesis-driven biblical
interpretation. Any study that lifts up one interpretive strand tempts
us to pit certain biblical texts against others, and Williams in his
readings must struggle against the temptation to dismiss the passages
that run counter to his thesis. In a way that perhaps fails to do
justice to the history of Hebraic texts, both Hamerton-Kelly and Bailie
seem unduly willing to take the prophets as the center of the Old
Testament.

Worse, this sort of biblical interpretation may tempt us not only to pit
Christian revelation against Jewish religion (an opposition for which
there is ample precedent in the New Testament), but to pit Christian
revelation against the Jews. Robert Hamerton-Kelly has struggled in
recent years against charges that his biblical scholarship betrays an
animus against the Jews, and a careful reading of his work reveals that
such charges are not true. But by beginning his study of the Gospel of
Mark with a strong, visceral image of the bloodstained Temple in
Jerusalem at the time of Christ, Hamerton-Kelly seems to admit the worse
charge that the Gospels themselves are anti-Semitic (a charge Girard
himself vehemently rebuts in a 1993 essay in the journal Biblical
Interpretation).

There are also theological and ecclesiological dangers in this sort of
thesis. That the Church has not always been true to the spirit of the
Gospels is undeniable, but this fact does not invalidate the Church. Any
reading of Christian history as a development in understanding a single
Gospel theme risks, for example, Teilhard de Chardin's sort of
evolutionary theology, with its consequent dismissal of patristic and
medieval formulations. Hans Urs von Balthasar, in his brief critique in
Theo-Drama, complains of Girard's too easy rejection of St. Anselm's
account of the Atonement (as though God "finds it necessary to defend
His honor"). In a weak moment at the end of Violence Unveiled, Bailie
seems near to saying that the Church is something we must outgrow.

What the Girardian analysis can help us see, however, is the way in
which Christianity itself contributes to our current cultural crises.
Hitler sacrificed millions of Jews to found what turned out to be a
twelve-year reich, Stalin made scapegoats of millions of
"counterrevolutionaries" to preserve a regime with only fifty more years
of life, and every little dictator since has slaughtered his own victims
to create or maintain an ephemeral authority. Thousand-year cultures are
not founded by sacrifice anymore, for the process of scapegoating no
longer seems to work very well. Everyone in the world has learned the
Christian demythologizing of sacred violence too well, and no one trusts
sacrifice to do what it once did.

Of course, the Serbs still undertake ethnic cleansing, the Iraqis still
speak of the Kurds as a disease, the Chinese still hunt down
counterrevolutionaries-for there is no other way they know to try to
maintain themselves. The culture-founding violence of the sacred is the
only method we know for ending the culture-destroying violence of
mimetic desire. Gil Bailie, throughout his book, and James Williams, in
his conclusion, trace the appearance and breakdown of the "scapegoat
mechanism" in innumerable contemporary events. Bandera similarly
includes in The Sacred Game a fascinating "Marxian Epilogue" in which he
traces the sacrificial logic of Marx's analysis of money (though its
relation to the rest of his book is not immediately apparent).

Maurice Merleau-Ponty was entirely right when he defended the objective
need of the revolutionary state to sacrifice subjectively innocent
scapegoats, just as the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt was right when he spoke
in the late 1920s of the state's need to kill its political enemies on
strictly "existential-ontological" grounds. But Merleau-Ponty and
Schmitt were nonetheless self-defeating in their attempts to describe
the process (when we understand how a myth works, it stops working), and
they were too late besides. The consistent failure of sacrifice in
modern times, the escalation of apparently insoluble violence, and the
strange cycles of mimetic victimization into which we have fallen (in
which victims compete for notice of their victimization) are all results
of the universalizing of Christian revelation's invincible
demythologizing of the sacred.

What has been lost in the universalizing, however, is the specificity of
Christian revelation. This unspecific universality is presumably what
historians mean when they speak of contemporary culture as the post-
Christian age. The pre-Christian sacred scapegoat can no longer preserve
culture, and we face the collapse of all our cultural distinctions in a
mad cycle of mimetic violence. But despite this, or even perhaps because
of this, Girard suggests that we may at last have reached the moment for
a new cultural appropriation of Christian revelation-of those things
hidden since the foundation of the world. Violence can no longer cast
out violence, Satan can no longer cast out Satan, and only our return to
the gospel can save us.